Tag: town council

Tonight I will be presenting to my towns local democrats club. It’s an opportunity for people willing to run to make a statement as to why they would run.

………..

Good evening. Thank you all for being here. This is my first ‘speech’ of a political nature, or of any variety and I appreciate you baring with me.

A few months back I sat on my couch feeling things I’d never felt before. The champagne stayed corked, some heavier drinks got drunk and I fell asleep ashamed and saddened by the choice we made. We elected a President that was shamefully unqualified, dangerously temperamental and hopelessly out of touch with American ideals. I’d lost my country. More to the point, I may never have had a good handle on who we were.

It appears I wasn’t alone. I started to find likeminded people coming out of the woodwork. People similarly startled and shaken and searching. Searching for what we could do to resist this wave of ugly nationalism that seems to be growing in vitriol and volume. Voices of disunity and intolerance rising from every corner of the globe it would seem.

What can we do, now that we’re here, I thought.

First there were raised voices in the form of marches and protests and, well, resistance. The energy I saw was a huge help. It made me see there were so many of us.

I’ve long believed there was no home for me politically. I’ve been an independent for most of my life because the left refused to speak it’s conscience. That changed this cycle. We’ve been unbridled of late, but it wasn’t so long ago that a candidate such as President Obama would say they were for civil unions as opposed to saying they were for gay marriage. I understood the political expediency of such a statement, but everyone knew it was not his opinion. The left, over decades, has been pulled so far to the middle by redistricting and the seemingly never ending march to the right by our fellow Americans in the other party that it left anyone with a truly inclusive perspective out.

There’s a liberal conscience that has risen to the surface in the past 5 months. It’s kicked into high gear since the inauguration. It’s a conscience that knows what is right and what is dead wrong. It knows that we are strengthened by diversity. It knows that we are strongest when we show compassion and charity for those that struggle. It knows that we owe it to our children, to all children, to start cleaning up this earth before we hand it over, picked clean of its sustaining bounty. The conscience of the left knows that security cannot come from acting out of fear and cowardice. It knows the world is a dangerous place because decades of the redistribution of wealth from the broad middle to the fat and getting fatter at the very top of the economic food chain has left many in desperate conditions. The left has a conscience. What it’s been lacking is a voice. What we’ve been lacking is the confidence to stand and say plainly what we believe to be true.

What does that have to do with conducting the business of New Providence you might ask. I’d ask it too. It’s a bit of a stretch to tie all of this to us in this room, I know. But ultimately all of these things are what are animating this rising engagement on the left. For too long we haven’t been organized and many of us have felt alone in our views while unable to avoid seeing the brazen confidence of a conservative movement that has come to its current place of untethered rage and unabashed hate and undoubted electoral dominance at every level of government seemingly without resistance. They’ve done all of this because they’ve always, always been better at this than we have been. They are better at organizing. Better at being present in the local meeting rooms like this one. They are organized.

We’ve spent far too long relying on the fact that our ideas would rise to the top regardless of whether or not we spent any energy pushing them there. We’ve spent far too long assuming that love would trump hate. We thought that before the sticker, before the president. We still think it. But if we’ve learned one thing from the past few months its that effort wins. Participation wins. Showing up AND speaking up wins. And we haven’t been doing it. Not here. Not in the ‘Trump Country’ where I was raised. Not in the halls of power where state after state after state have come to not even be concerned by our existence, forget our ideas. It’s not a contest of ideas now. It’s an organizational challenge now and we’re way behind.

I don’t know I’m the right person for this job. I don’t. I’m frankly excited to have anyone of the people you see here tonight as an option. For too long we’ve ceded our towns and villages and counties and state governments to the conservatives by not meeting their civic engagement with our own. They have beaten us fair and square. They sustain on a culture of service. A culture that prizes community leadership at the most fundamentally local levels. It sustains the entire movement. And we’ve surrendered, over decades, without so much as raising our hands to participate.

Well, that’s where I see the problem. Ultimately I hope I’m a small part of a much larger movement. One that gets in there and fights for what’s right unabashedly and unashamedly knowing that we stand together. That will show up, that will ask questions. That will not let control of our most basic, most crucial resources be controlled by one party without so much as a single voice of descent in the room when decisions are being made.

I’m offering my service because I believe it’s what we need to do. We need to be engaged, we need to participate, we need to lead. Here in our town. I’m hoping there are meetings like this happening all over the county, the state and the country. Because we need to change what it means to be liberal. We need to change it right here, where we live.